


MAN OF FAMINE

by Kyabetsu



Category: TMNT (2007), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Addiction, Blasphemy, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Desperation, Disordered Eating, Explicit Language, Gen, Gore, Halloween Gift Exchange, Horror, If You Are Not A Cursed Turtle Do Not Try This At Home, Irish Mythology - Freeform, Nightwatcher, Revulsion, Starvation, TMNT Spooky Gift Exchange
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:22:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27321139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyabetsu/pseuds/Kyabetsu
Summary: Hunger is an old enemy, but now it has reinforcements.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9
Collections: Tmnt Spooky Gift Exchange 2020





	MAN OF FAMINE

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Winnychan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winnychan/gifts).



> Winny, would that I had the entire spooky fic done for you tonight. Consider this a downpayment on something properly terrifying.
> 
> Kala, my last-minute ass loves you. Thank you so much for your Beta Work.

Raphael shoveled cereal into his face relentlessly. Yeah, he was home early tonight. 2am counted as early when your ‘dayshift’ ran 8pm to 8am. He had his reasons. 

Shit. 

Tonight had been fucked up and he was starving. He poured a second bowl and splashed the last of the milk over it. Mike would bitch that they were out, but if he was that desperate for dairy, he could chug some of Don's fancy creamers. Wouldn’t be the first time.

___

“Oy! Have you a dollar on you at all?” 

The Nightwatcher’s heavy boots turned up mud and wet grass as he spun to face the voice behind him. Thin, greasy fog coated the scraggly band of trees edging the field. Chest heaving and leather suit creaking against his exertion, he scanned the darkness through his visor, but all he found was patchy grass, stagnant water, and mud. He didn’t see anyone. Must’ve been someone calling back by the access road. Sound carried strangely out here near the river.

He’d chased a local low-rent drug dealer and his shitty excuse for a bodyguard all the way from the rim of the Pink Houses to the waterfront here in Brooklyn. Now he stood, sinking in the mud, clammy and cold, scanning a horizon of scrub and stench that stretched around the waste water plant, and trying to spot footprints through a tinted visor. 

Christ. This helmet was better out in the bright lights of the city. He raised the visor and flipped on the LED directional lights mounted on it, straining his hearing and walking a slow sweep of the area. The lights only made the fog thicker.

“I asked did you bring money at all at all!” A plastic cup of coins rattled aggressively right by his head.

The Nightwatcher jumped back and crouched low, hands on his chain weapon. He’d left his bike back on the other side of the treeline. That meant he was limited in his gear—as limited as a fully armed ninja ever could be.

A bent figure in a tattered puffy coat emerged from the grass and fog. Its grimy, all-too-human hand held out the cup and shook it again, more apologetically this time. 

“We have a hunger upon us is all. Nights like this bring a man to beg.” 

A soggy black baseball cap smashed the limp shoulder-length gray hair down in a stringy curtain and two piercing eyes glinted over sharp cheekbones and sunken cheeks. The man’s upper teeth had gone missing and he alternately folded his lower lip into the gap or smiled broadly with that patch of darkness punching an unsettling hole in his face. His free hand shook as he nervously dragged it under his dripping nose.

The Nightwatcher was getting panhandled by goddamn hobo Lucky Charms. 

___

Raphael shoved his arms around in the fridge to a chorus of clinking bottles. 

Usually a few bowls of cereal and some stretches settled him down. Tonight, his stomach had other things to say about that. He didn’t think he’d been neglecting his protein lately, but he had learned to listen to his body about food stuff. Not like the fucking FDA put out dietary guidelines for mutant turtles. For all Raph knew, the turtle food pyramid was based on fried chicken. Mikey sure ate that way. And tonight, Raph agreed with him. He snagged the slightly soggy bucket of leftover KFC from the back of the fridge. And the two liter of soda too. Michelangelo wouldn’t mind sharing.

___

The harsh glare of the Nightwatcher’s lights did the vagrant no favors. The guy looked like the goddamn Cryptkeeper. The Nightwatcher straightened quickly, warring frustrations making his voice sharper than he intended. “Do I look like I’ve got my wallet on me?!” 

The longer the Nightwatcher stood here with this bum, the further away his targets were getting! Add in that this drifter really did look like a walking corpse—the kind of person the papers would write about finding dead and frozen to the sidewalk in a month, if not sooner—and that he genuinely did not carry cash on his suit? The Nightwatcher bristled at the impossibility of the situation. 

“Look. I gotta find those two guys who just ran through here. They stabbed a kid. As soon as I get them, I’ll tie’em up and call it in to the cops and you can collect the reward money, okay?” 

The bagman’s stomach gurgled loudly and he shook his head. His lower lip practically disappeared into his mouth as his chin rose in defiance. “It is not. I don’t need riches. Don’t like police. Just a bit of change or a bite of food. You’ll have no luck bringing those rascals to justice tonight.” 

___

Raphael’s gut rolled slowly. The chicken was gone. Just him and a sweaty wax paper bucket of bones at the table now. He burped under his breath as the remains of the Mountain Dew fizzed in his throat and tilted back his chair to jerk the fridge door open. He slid the jar of pimento olives off the shelf. Just a little something else to fill in the corners.

___

“No! You know what?! I don’t got time for this. I get them, then I’ll fucking phone pizza for you. You’re alive enough to bitch at me? Then you’re alive enough to wait. They. Murdered. A. Child.” 

The Nightwatcher’s lights jerked away from the old man and swept back and forth across the mud. There would be footprints, a ton of footprints.

“They did be chasing their appetites out into that hungry grass, but the field is dangerous tonight. A third time, we ask charity of yourself.” 

The fog hemmed in the space around the pair, and for a moment, the Nightwatcher almost started back to his bike to get the man a protein bar. 

“Not right now. My luck, those two are already on the other side of the sewage plant and headed for Queens!”

The vagrant slumped into his coat, small against the night and the cold. “That’s fine so, is it? Remember yourself. ‘Right now’ can feel an eternal hell and no man can trust to luck.” 

___

Raphael shivered as he recalled the way he’d suddenly stood alone in the field. One moment, the pocket of fog squeezed the world down to just him and the bum, the next moment, a breeze swirled the low mist away from his boots. He’d been practically standing on the criminals’ tracks! He took off across the grass the second the pressure of the mist relented. He hunched at the table, remembering the way the fog clung to him as he burst through it. Cold, wet fingers, streaking across his eyes and down his face, pulling at his mouth and nose through the open visor. Even home and safe, his skin burned and pricked with cold sweat, like an echo of sensation. He shoved himself upright. He had the freezer open in a heartbeat and in a rare fit of comfort eating, he snagged a fudge pop out of the box. 

___

The footprints got weird. There should have been two sets of feet, running parallel or single file, headed for the quickest way around the low concrete pillars and slabs. Sure, the tracks started that way, but somewhere along the way, the runners stopped, paced around, one of them took off—the smaller guy, the boss, since his prints weren’t so deep in the mud. The bigger guy, the bodyguard, gave chase. He must have tackled his boss. A huge patch of flattened grass, gouges in the mud, standing water filled in the depressions--there was no denying it’d been a hell of a brawl. What the fuck were these guys fighting about? The Nightwatcher picked up his pace.

The lights from the Nightwatcher’s helmet knifed a gash through the darkness. Mud caked his boots and halfway up his calves. Earth and swampy water dragged at his feet and the familiar stench of sewage mixed with the brackish salt water where the boundary of Brooklyn and the river and the ocean harbor blurred. The tracks were gone, but these assholes had stomped a path through the rushes wide enough for Donnie to drive the van down. Well. Not that wide, but fuck it. The Nightwatcher chuckled under his breath. He didn’t have to be some elite, jungle-dwelling world traveller to follow this trail. 

Splashing and grunting sounded ahead. Were those two dipshits still fighting in ankle-deep muck? Light streaked across a pair of bodies grappling just beyond the closest clump of grass. Red. That was the Nightwatcher’s first impression. How two soaked, muddy shitheads in black and blue gang colors got so much red everywhere—his confusion resolved with crystalline clarity. The assholes still had their knives. 

Arms flailing, legs kicking, both men bled profusely from cuts more likely to rip clothes than put down an enemy. The Nightwatcher opened his mouth to shout at the pair of them, hoping to get their attention and drop them in straightforward attacks. He didn’t need to catch a random knife thrust from a distracted moron, but just in that heartbeat, one of them shouted. Cloth tore, and the big guy’s weirdly boney chest lay exposed. His boss’ eyes glinted and before the Nightwatcher could unholster his chain, the man lunged forward and bit through the bodyguard’s pec. 

Flesh popped and crackled. The boss jerked his head back. Sinew stretched and blood bubbled over his chin. A chunk of meat hung in his mouth. His sharp jaw chewed it frantically. 

Bodyguard screamed. His knife flashed at the little guy’s face. An enormous cut slashed his cheekbone. Boss cried out, muffled by the meat in his jaws. His bony hands came up to push the bodyguard away. Bodyguard slashed at his face again, severing more of the boss’ skin. The chunk of cheek hung loose, flapping against the chest flesh still sticking out of his mouth. They struggled against one another. The bigger man stabbed at the front of the boss’ chest. Bodyguard shoved in close and ripped the flopping skin from his boss’ face with his teeth. 

Boss heaved and squealed, lips still clamped around the chunk of chest he’d won. Strings of gristle and spit swung. His teeth chewed desperately. The whole side of his head splashed and sprayed. His skeletal hands reached and clawed at the wound on the other man’s chest. Bodyguard, bones more prominent by the moment, swallowed his mouthful. He lurched forward to crunch an enormous bite that sheared off Boss’ nose. 

The Nightwatcher’s insides froze at the bubbling scream. He was watching a man eat another man alive! Coppery blood scent sloshed in with the pall of sewage and the sulfur of the saltwater marsh. The boss hung like a pile of sticks in his clothes, and the bodyguard squatted in the muck gorging on the popping gristle of his partner’s throat. Neither of them had acknowledged the light. Neither of them acknowledged the third person standing in half-frozen bog with them. 

The Nightwatcher’s training overrode his stunned mind. Weighted chain shot out and pinned the body guard’s arms to his sides. Now in motion, the Nightwatcher hauled the big man backwards and nearly lost his balance when his target just wasn’t as heavy as he’d looked. The cannibal howled and thrashed against the chain binding. The Nightwatcher did not give the man time to get his feet under himself. He turned in place and hauled on the chain. His muscle and his training dragged the man shrieking away from his meal. Slick mud kept the psychopath safely behind him. 

Bellows became screams. Screams became cries. Cries faded to whimpers. The Nightwatcher picked up speed. The psycho freak he’d captured finally stopped struggling and he made good time backtracking towards drier ground. When the weight on his chain eased and loose links tinkled in the darkness, the Nightwatcher turned to find his captive vanished. 

__

Mud everywhere. Wait. Stickier than mud. Smelled like—fudge pop. Confused, Raphael shifted away from the open freezer. His feet shuffled over open wrappers and gnawed popsicle sticks. They were gone. He knew they were gone. You couldn’t have fudge pops left after you ate them all. But he didn’t remember eating them all. But they were definitely gone. 

Raphael nodded in agreement with his thoughts and steadied himself on the fridge handle. They were gone, because he’d gone back to look for them. He didn’t need some crazy cannibal bodyguard leaping out of the night at him. He wasn’t gonna leave a job half done. They’d knifed a kid. They’d eaten each other—one of them more than the other. 

He’d been out in that marsh until past midnight, exhausted and freezing, and fucking hungry, but he hadn’t found any sign of the assholes. The condiment bottles rattled in the door of the fridge. What else was there to eat around here? Looking for lost bodies and actual cannibals took a lot out of a guy.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Caroaimezoe, for hosting such an incredible event!
> 
> And thank you to everyone who decided to give this fic a little nibble. 
> 
> \--Kya


End file.
